Tracy: A Business-driven Technical Debt Prioritization Framework
This addresses the challenge for software development teams in balancing debt management with new feature development, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing prioritization approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of prioritizing technical debt in software development by introducing Tracy, a business-driven framework built on business processes, with initial evaluation showing it contributes to business-driven decision-making.
Technical debt is a pervasive problem in software development. Software development teams have to prioritize debt items and determine whether they should address debt or develop new features at any point in time. This paper presents "Tracy", a framework for the prioritization of technical debt using a business-driven approach built on top of business processes. The current stage of the proposed framework is at the beginning of the third phase of Design Science Research, which is usually divided into the phases of exploration, engineering, and evaluation. The exploration and engineering phases involved the participation of 49 professionals from 12 different groups of three companies. The initial evaluation shows that the presented framework is coherent in its structure and that its results contribute to business-driven decision making on technical debt prioritization.